Catching a tune on China’s most popular karaoke app

Part of a series about life on the Chinese internet.

Been on Quanmin for four months. I post a song everyday at ten. I spend two to four hours and record each song really diligently. It takes up most of my free time. I’ve definitely thought about quitting but more and more of you tune in at ten, so I’ve kept going. I’m really fortunate to get to know you guys.

Karaoke is a mainstay of going out in China, as it is in Korea and Japan. So it’s no surprise that karaoke apps have become an important part of China’s music ecosystem. Since launching two years ago, Tencent’s 全民K歌 has shot to the top of the charts. As of July 2016, it’s the number 8 app in the App Store. It’s name, Quanmin K Ge (pronounced choo-an min kay guh), means “Karaoke Songs for the Whole Citizenry”, or simply “Karaoke for Everybody.”

A place to sing your heart out

Quanmin is a singalong app with social features. You record audio or video of you singing and share it with people. You can even record a version that leaves space for others to fill in their part of a duet and the app will create a single track and video from your efforts.

People take it seriously. The app has a “practice mode” where you can sing specific bars over and over till you get them perfect and it’s common to see people say they’ve practiced a song a bunch of times before getting to the version you’re hearing.

But it’s the duet mode that turns the app from another social media app into a thriving community. The singer becomes the host of the community, welcoming everybody to come sing together. And through the magic of technology, when fans choose to sing a duet with the host, they appear together in a newly cut video despite being separated by time and space.

To sing, a person must be willing to be vulnerable. Not only do words of emotion come from the mouth, but bad singing can cause embarrassment. This is probably why karaoke is popular in East Asian cultures, where social cohesion is important. Singing together, as does drinking together (and these often go hand in hand), exposes people’s true character. And when people do it online, it creates a very intimate setting where strangers singing together for the first time can feel as if they’re buddies since long ago.

There’s a competitive aspect to see who can sing a song the best. Singers can earn badges and see where they rank in the charts for a given song. Listeners can give virtual gifts they’ve purchased to singers, and earning the best gifts is another way of proving your mettle.

But the quality of the singing is also kind of besides the point. There’re plenty of mediocre singers on Quanmin who also get followers and gifts. Just as you cheer on tonally challenged friends at a real karaoke, giving plenty of love to off-pitch singers is part of the communal experience on Quanmin. And that’s really what Chinese social media apps excel at — radiating tons of 人气 (rén qì), that otherwise ineffable quality of people-energy wherever large groups of humans congregate (i.e. everywhere in China, including cyberspace).

Lax Regulation and Growth

Quanmin has the hits people want. It’s hard to imagine an app in an economy with extensive IP protections putting together such a deep catalog of music and making it free for users. China’s just emerging from an era where IP rights were unenforceable due to lax regulations and fast-moving technology. But the government issued an edict earlier this year saying it would crack down on music services that don’t hold rights to their content and that’s turned things around very quickly. Now you have to pay for music in popular music apps before listening. That would’ve been unthinkable not long ago.

But karaoke apps, like all content services in China, have benefited from lax rules as they built up critical mass. I suspect they now have a deal with record labels where they won’t let you play the original tracks easily — only the instrumental versions you can sing to. Nonetheless, having instrumental versions of all popular songs along with their lyrics up is a real win for Quanmin.

Quanmin also continues the theme of Tencent’s domination in different tech verticals. As with WeChat, which wasn’t the first chat app in China but has become the unassailable market leader, Quanmin also launched after its chief rival 唱吧 (Chang Ba), but now consistently beats Chang Ba in the charts. Tencent also has a leading music service and audio content app.

Feature convergence

If you look through a few social media, audio, and video apps from China, you’ll notice several common UX features (check out Dan Glover’s in depth post on this).

The most prominent one is probably the “bullet curtain,” where comments shoot across the screen like projectiles and are timed to the moment during the clip when a user posted the comment (see second video for example). This feature is everywhere in China. Imagine if YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Video, Spotify, and Apple Music all had it. That’s what it’s like when you use Chinese apps. And I admit, it’s visually very interesting and adds to the overall people-energy. In the west, we’d probably call it “cluttered.”

This points to another feature of the Chinese app ecosystem, which is that good design ideas are replicated widely. This leads to a degree of UX homogenization but I think it also means that design converges on the most useful and rational concepts. Chinese app design tends to avoid what western designers call “delight”, particularly in the form of clever animations. The way Chinese designers add character is through animal mascots, like Quanmin’s singing bird.

Quanmin’s a good place to start as we learn about different Chinese apps. It has distinct Chinese features and comes from an engrained cultural habit — singing for people — even if they are just mostly saccharine love songs.

Part of a series about life on the Chinese internet.